


writing letters

by fillingintheblanks



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, backstory spoilers for beau and jester and fjord (a bit), i am fully bullshitting ages and travel times but im trying i swear, implied teahaw, there are some others in there but its mainly them, there's actual dialogue now lmao, tried to get this out before the episode but its here now, writing on your skin shows up on your soulmates body
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25888924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fillingintheblanks/pseuds/fillingintheblanks
Summary: beauregard lionett hated sleeves. she hated the way they felt against her skin and how they looked. mostly she hated that her sleeves hid the messages her soulmate left.she also kind of hated her soulmate for leaving them.a beaujes soulmate au that at least tries to make soulmates the only divergence from canon (for now)
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Comments: 12
Kudos: 131





	1. though i am far away

**Author's Note:**

> this was written in two nights because my brain wouldn't put it down. hope you enjoy! two more parts to come  
> title is lyrics from ron pope's writing letters

beauregard lionett hated sleeves. she hated the way they felt against her skin and how they looked. she hated how her father would pull her along by them as if it was too hard to just grab her wrist or shoulder. she hated how her mother would tug them down from her elbows so they went all the way to her knuckles and how the extended cuffs’ rough seams made her palms itchy. she hated how they made it harder to climb trees and how easy they were to get dirty or wet or ripped or anything that had her parents leading her up to her room to change. she hated how her hands were slapped away from lifting them to scratch or wash her hands or read all that was written there. mostly beauregard lionett hated that her sleeves hid the messages her soulmate left.  
she also kind of hated her soulmate for leaving them.

they'd been around for every moment she had memory of - her parents never told her when they started, but beauregard would guess they hadn't been there for the first year or so. at any given time, her arms were littered with colorful letters in a language she didn't know, little doodles of everyday objects, and a few recurring characters in various scenarios, the most common of which being a little green blob in the shape of a cloak, a red blob with horns and a tail, and a blue blob who was always next to the red one when it was there, sometimes with another, smaller, blue blob with a short tail and even shorter horns next to them. how they got all those colors, beauregard didn't know. sometimes there were words in common, simple stuff that changed throughout the day - good mornings and good nights and once a “have you heard of the traveller?” that had beauregard in her father’s library for the rest of the day to no avail.

she never wrote her soulmate back, not once. at first, it was because her parents had drilled it so far into her head when they caught her in thoreau’s office looking for ink. but even when she turned rebellious, she never did. she would've claimed it was because all the ink in the house was locked up in her father’s desk but really it was because she was scared. there was no chance for her to meet her soulmate, so there was no point in getting their hopes up. beauregard had realized long ago that her parents covered up their own skin as much as possible for a reason and she knew well that they’d never let her chase an opportunity they’d never had. why break her soulmate’s heart, too, she reasoned.

and yet, the drawings never stopped.

beauregard slept in a tank top and shorts and would stay up too late trying to catch every little marking she’d missed during the day, reading up on her soulmate and falling deeper every night. she longed to understand the characters in the language she didn’t know that clustered on her legs and her right arm (her soulmate was left-handed, she guessed) but her father had kicked her out of the library the one time she’d tried to identify it before she was done flipping through the second book. designs danced across her skin, black ink barely standing out against it in the moonlight, straining her eyes to take it all in. her soulmate seemed intent on hiding little messages in places, small hearts in between her toes or a “you found me!” in messy common on the back of her knee. one night, looking in the mirror, beauregard discovered a small smiley face behind her left ear and she smiled softly before realizing she’d have to wear her hair down for the next few days.  
it was hard to decide whether she liked the markings or not. it was easier to pretend she didn’t.

when she was nearly sixteen, beauregard woke up to find next to nothing on her skin. that was a new and entirely off-putting experience, and she searched frantically in the usual places for some sign of her soulmate. and she found some, there, written steady on the bottom of her right foot, words in common. beauregard sat back on the edge of her bed, letting out a breath she didn't know she’d been holding, pulled her foot into her lap to read.

“why don't you write me back?”

she sat looking at it for ages, the rising sun moving shadows across her room. she read it over and over, studying the movements used to create it. she stared until her mother knocked and opened her door and she snapped her foot back to the floor, swiped at her damp cheeks. her mother let her get dressed for longer than usual. let her linger a little over breakfast. gave her an extra second before sending her to check the books for her father. beauregard couldn't bring herself to acknowledge it with a thank you.

that day her skin stayed blank, but she held the ends of her sleeves in her hands tighter than ever. she checked her foot again before climbing into bed and found nothing. sunrise brought her usual good morning and doodles, an unpleasant dose of guilt accompanying them. she was much faster getting into her pants and long-sleeve shirt than usual.

there was a use for the sleeves, beauregard found. they made slipping a bottle or two of some fine lionett wine out of the stores a lot more easy to hide. they were good for tucking a knife into if she was feeling particularly worried about a deal, for collecting coins so they wouldn't glint in the firelight of the lanterns on the streets, for hiding her hands in when she made it home so she didn't leave any incriminating streaks of dirt on her window. and the gold was nice, but tori was nicer. it was clear she wasn’t beauregard’s soulmate - tori was right-handed, she discovered soon enough, and she wasn't much of an artist in anything except cons. the designs that traced across tori’s skin were few and far between, all in beautiful elven script that tori claimed she’d never been interested in learning, but that beauregard would trace carefully as if they were printed on her own skin. she was grateful that tori never mentioned it, or the colorful bursts spiraling down her own legs and covering her arms. had left it alone after a soft kiss pressed to a smiley face behind beauregard’s left ear had been swiftly pushed away.

they got into far more trouble together than they had planned to. beauregard stooped to new lows she tried to think of as highs, even when the highs she got at the parties tori took her to made her much happier than she’d been in years. it had been just over two years before they got caught, tori pulling beauregard in with finality for a messy kiss before they were pulled apart one last time. that night was the most sober one she’d had since the start, and she spent it trying to push her sleeves up against the bars to read her good night message before it was rubbed away come dawn.

beauregard was back home for all of a night and two days before she found herself on the doorstep with a stinging cheek and nothing but some clothes and the meager amount of goods she’d managed to collect from her room in a sack. four intimidating monks stood silent before her, lining the short path to a small cart, looking every bit the opposite of the librarians she’d been expecting. she followed them, eyes on a sharp elf with blond hair curling to his thin shoulders, partially obscuring the scrawled words climbing his neck.

the elf was archivist zeenoth, beauregard discovered, listening to the monks’ short conversations as they made their way to zadash. he seemed to think he was in charge, a quality that beauregard linked easily to her father’s meddling and that had her quickly dismissing his authority. upon arrival, she was introduced to countless other members of the cobalt soul, all dressed in various colored vestiges with varying degrees of intimidation and markings on their skin. she held her sleeves tight in her hands, wary around so many even with the fake confidence tori had helped instill.

in the two years that she spent at the cobalt soul, beauregard learned to let go of her sleeves. she learned elven and deep speech and dwarven and discovered that the language that crawled across her skin was infernal and tried to translate parts of it in the little free time she had, ending up with odd half phrases like “momma sang so well last -“ and “the ruby of the sea is -“. somehow, they were even more endearing. beauregard dropped sleeves from her wardrobe entirely, got a few more piercings, gave herself an undercut that a monk happily fixed for her. she donned the baggy pants and long blue sash of the monks, ripped the sleeves from her favorite shirts, and stuck with it, letting the words and doodles roam free across her skin. she learned to fight a bit, but the classes were exhausting and no one really knew how best to teach her, leaving everybody who tried more annoyed than fulfilled. she was learning patience and agression and how best to sit down and read a book. for beauregard, two of those things didn’t come very naturally, but she tried in her own way.

shortly after her twenty-first birthday - not that those held much significance at the archive - she was handed a letter by archivist zeenoth from her parents. they hadn't talked in years and beauregard couldn’t hold back her curiosity. so she headed to her room and popped the seal and read what her father had deemed important enough to send.

a son. of course.

beauregard packed her things that night. she stuck around for three more days, getting in one last class in each field before setting off. she kept her vestiges, the quarterstaff, the ribbon for her hair, and hopped out of her window long after the sliver of cathas had crested the horizon, ruidus nothing but a red shadow far beyond.

zadash was pretty at night. the lampposts along the roads flickered softly in the breeze, the cool night air brushing across beauregard’s face, stirring loose strands of hair about her eyes. she waved goodbye to the familiar streets, bending to pet the few stray cats that knew her well. she snagged an apple from the apple tree in a usually busy park, made her way to the city limits, heading for the hills to the south and the amber road.

beauregard walked 'til morning and through the day, convinced a passing cart to carry her for a while so she could rest in exchange for helping them unload when they reached their destination a few hours down the road. they thanked the “clara” she had panic-identified herself as and she shrugged off the twinge of loss as she slung her staff off her back and returned to walking. come nightfall, she found a fallen tree that was large enough to squat under and set up camp, not daring to start a fire for warmth.

in all her time at the archive, beauregard had never ventured to write her soulmate back. she had managed to rip the sleeves away, to display what her parents had tried to keep hidden, but she still hadn’t let herself hope enough to be able to grab the ink or the chalk necessary to respond. maybe something had clicked in her brain when she finally returned the letter to its envelope, maybe it was something she had been meaning to do all along, but when she slipped her hand into her bag, her fingers curled almost instinctively around a loosely wrapped chunk of white chalk.

beauregard pulled it out of the bag. squinted to find the goodnight message her soulmate had left and the characters in infernal just next to it on her right ankle. she unwrapped the chalk, pressed the edge to her skin below the words, marveled a bit at the sensation, and began to write.


	2. and i am all alone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> jester lavorre was certain she had a soulmate. absolutely convinced. no one could tell her different and if they tried they wouldn't get past the first sentence before she nearly bit their head off with a speech about destiny and hearts and true love and they tended to keep their opinions to themselves after that.  
> it was about the small victories.
> 
> chapter two of a beaujes soulmate au where the only current divergence from canon is the soulmate aspect itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello! hope this helps fill part of the void of no new episode thursday, though there is a distinct lack of beauyasha in this fic lol. hope you enjoy!

jester lavorre was certain she had a soulmate. absolutely convinced. no one could tell her different and if they tried they wouldn't get past the first sentence before she nearly bit their head off with a speech about destiny and hearts and true love and they tended to keep their opinions to themselves after that. so the idea had pretty much run its course after her momma brought it up, at least until the traveler decided to mention it.

jester lived well, spoiled with paints and chalks and inks to cover her walls and the posts on her bed and her own body. she liked to hide little secrets on her skin, hoping that her soulmate smiled as bright as she did making them when they found them. the mirror in her room assisted in many hard to spot messages, paint trickling slowly down her shoulder or chin before staining the skirt of her newest dress. she would try to paint words on her mommas arms when she wasn't looking until she was stopped with a gentle hand and a soft smile and a reminder that it didn’t work that way. how her momma’s skin was always blank, she didn’t know, but she’d never seen her paint any words on it either so she assumed her momma’s soulmate had blank skin, too. jester never liked the idea of blank skin when it could be covered in beautiful colors so she did her best to make sure her soulmate would never have to deal with that. a little bit it was because she didn't like having blank skin either.

the traveler tried very often to tell her that she was wrong about soulmates, that he was the only one for her. he would magic the doodles on her skin onto his hands as if she couldn’t see him doing it and remind her that not all soulmates are romantic ones. jester would scoff, write something fast in infernal and watch him try to read it before shakily copying it onto his own palm, mixing up the hands.

yes, maybe all signs pointed to no soulmate but jester was learning how to be patient. and besides, everyone had a soulmate, how could she be any different?

it went like this for a while. she spent her days pulling little pranks for the traveler and doodling her newest stories on her arms and legs. every morning she would write good morning in infernal and common on her right ankle and every night she would wash it off to write good night. she would ask her momma how to spell certain words in common and she would write it out on some parchment for jester to messily transcribe onto her skin. she’d draw her momma and the traveler and herself and sometimes her dad in a darker blue that either of them were so they were visible. after a mere minute of convincing from the green cloaked trickster over her shoulder, she once asked her soulmate if they'd ever heard of the traveler.

it wasn't until a night when her momma was busy with someone and the traveler hadn’t yet shown up that the confidence began to waver. well, when jester let the confidence waver noticeably rather than in just fleeting thoughts that she pushed away or in the crestfallen face she had every morning until she saw it in the mirror and smiled bright. but that night, just a few months after her fourteenth birthday, jester came out of the bath and got dressed into her sleep dress and didn't rush to recover her skin in drawings. instead she sat cross-legged on her bed and gazed at all her blank skin and tried to think of a real reason her soulmate wouldn’t write back. she couldn’t.

so she crawled to her bedside table and grabbed the plain white chalk left there and pulled her right foot into her lap.

“why don’t you write me back?”

it was clearer than most of her common, stood out more in the shadows cathas cast against her blue skin. she put the chalk back and kept looking at it, retracing the swoops of the letters with her eyes.

“that’s rather dramatic,” somebody murmured over her shoulder.

“where were you?” jester responded, letting her foot slip back down from her lap, turning her head to look at the half hidden face over her shoulder.

“ah, you know, here and there. but i’m here now, aren’t i?”

jester nodded with a slight frown and scooted up the bed to wiggle under the covers. the traveler settled down so he was sitting beside her.

“oh, come on, you’re going to leave them with that?”

jester mumbled her assent before rolling over, pulling the covers up to her chin. the traveler sighed.

“alright, i’ll be back in the morning.” and when she looked back over he was gone.

jester didn’t sleep well that night. and when she finally awoke with small bags under her eyes, the sun was already past the horizon, shining brightly through her bedroom window. still exhausted, jester stumbled from her bed and knocked on her momma’s door, falling past nadine when it was opened. wordlessly, she flopped onto her momma's bed with a slight wave to the fond gaze of the ruby of the sea, closed her eyes and fell back asleep. she’d never been any good at getting less than ten hours.

when she woke up the second time, it was at a gentle shake from her momma and a whisper that some food was ready if jester was interested. bleary eyed, she accepted it and ate slowly while zoning out into a wall, earning a few chuckles from the woman beside her on the bed. she squinted her way through a few activities before retiring to her room for her nightly bath and plopping back into bed for the night.

the next morning she awoke with a start, sleep somehow reminding her of the note left at the bottom of her foot. she ripped off her covers to check the foot and found it blank and wanted to kick herself for leaving her skin empty all night. what if her soulmate stopped reading what she wrote? what if they stopped loving her?

“what if they never existed in the first place, your skin being blank is their fault, too.”

“traveler,” jester started, putting aside her surprise to indignantly turn and face the green cloak on the bed, “they exist! they love me and i’ll find them.”

“yes, yes,” the traveler relented with a teasing sigh and a light tap to jester’s nose, “you are right, as always.”

she giggled and swatted away his hand, holding onto it when her fingers didn’t pass through his. she looked up at him earnestly, imagining a beautiful face under the green cloak.

“do you really think they don’t exist?”

the traveler was silent for a moment before he covered her hands with his other one and squeezed softly.

“i think they do exist, and i know you’ll find them.”

jester smiled shyly at his sincere tone and looked down, her hands closing around nothing as she felt his presence fade away.

“i will,” she whispered after him and grabbed her chalk and charcoal to cover her skin in drawings once again.

after that, jester kept at it. each night after her bath she would hike her ankle into her lap and spell out good night in common and infernal, and each morning she would rub it off and replace it with good morning. during the day she would doodle and write all over, sometimes just out of habit and sometimes with the express purpose of reaching out. she left the secret messages more often and wrote out the stories of her pranks on her momma’s clients and the things the traveler taught her. as she grew up, her drawings improved steadily, small colored blobs becoming detailed silhouettes of her momma and of what she could see of the traveler. she liked drawing the view out her windows and the reactions she got to the pranks she pulled. the sketches and paintings filled her sketchbook and covered the papers plastered to her walls. she never did her best on her skin, not only because it didn’t offer her the flat surface she tended to prefer, but because she was kind of selfish.

what soulmate who never talked back deserved to see her best work? they got all her sketches and stories and got to watch as her art improved and still nothing. they could wait, jester had waited long enough.

it was about the small victories.

as jester got older, she became increasingly more powerful - the traveler showing her new tricks whenever she asked, handing her the reins to more magic than she’d seen before. her pranks got bigger, planned well and executed even better most of the time. she longed to run free about nicodranas but she understood why she couldn’t, allowed herself to thrive within the walls of the chateau. she only let the yearning get to her at night while the sun set, when she would hang her arms out her half-open window and gaze wistfully at the people sprawled out by the surf, the large boats moving in and out of port by the beam of the mother’s lighthouse. she wished for a chance to see the temple up close, maybe paint a little green cloak on it as the traveler suggested one time he found her looking out at it.

every so often, jester would be too caught up in planning for some massive prank to check every hour like normal. so, the day she stepped out of her room into her momma’s just as lord robert sharpe came out of the restroom in nothing but the ruby of the sea’s girdle, she was far too preoccupied to scan her arms and legs. especially now that they were not her’s but marion lavorre’s.

the prank itself went off beautifully. the lord stood locked on the balcony for nearly half an hour before the real ruby of the sea realized what had happened, doing his best to take cover from the public eye, huddled against the wall behind the railing. he was furious when he was back in his clothes and he knew jester’s face. it was a much more serious problem than either her or the traveler had ever anticipated and the next few hours she spent collecting her things with her momma were the most awful of her whole life. a hefty pouch was slipped underneath the clothes and food and supplies that were tucked neatly into a backpack and her momma pulled her tight to her chest as nadine knocked on the door to tell them night had fallen.

it was a strange feeling, to finally be allowed to roam the town she had supposedly grown up in. it was dark, impossibly so, at least to jester who couldn’t remember a time where the only lights were the street lanterns lining the edges of the opal archways and the faint glow of cathas, a mere half of it’s full beauty. starlight reflected off the cobblestone streets and off the water in the distance and jester felt like she was walking in the sky itself, wondered idly if it looked anything like where the traveler went when he wasn’t talking to her. she made her way to the beach first, kicked off her boots and threw down her bag to wade into the surf at last. she walked along the beach until the sun rose, halted to watch the sky fade it’s way through each beautiful color and fished her sketchbook and inks out of her bag to copy it as best she could.

eventually jester found a town and bought a carriage and a horse and an outfit for the horse when she realized - horrified - that it hadn’t come with one. she made her way up the coast, stopping early each night to camp and waking in time for the sunrise each morning. she watched as cathas shrunk from a half to a third to a quarter and then she spotted port damali over the horizon and a slightly damp half-orc in some beaten up armor climbing the next hill toward her and she had to stop early.

jester was almost disappointed when fjord’s skin was blank except for a few layman's terms it looked like he’d written himself and a scrawling list of something that looked like ingredients for a drink of some sort, but she couldn’t hold back her grin when she pointed it out and he blushed and tried to hide his excitement in pushing up his sleeve to get a better look. he told her that it had been a while since the last message, how infrequently they came, but the shy smile that just barely revealed his scratched teeth told her how happy they made him anyway.

they turned course that night, making their way back down the road jester had just made her way up, stopping in port zoon for a bath they both desperately needed. jester had kept up with the good morning and night messages, rubbing each away in the ocean instead of her usual daily bath, and wiping away the doodles to just replace them with more. she had been regularly checking for new markings but fjord had kind of distracted her and when she finally rubbed everything away in the steaming water of the bathhouse in port zoon, she nearly jumped out of her skin at the letters in white on her ankle, right near where her infernal good night message had been left from the night before.

the letters were thick, messy in a way that hinted at neatness if it weren’t for the new medium of chalk on skin. they were fit into the shallow beneath her ankle bone, curving slightly to follow it. jester reached out to trace them, almost in a trance, not yet comprehending the meaning in the common. she wanted to ask the traveler if this was his latest prank but she couldn’t bring herself to ruin it. and when jester finally read the words, she let out a scream.

“will you teach me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope yall are ready for the next chapter and sorry for the half-cliffhanger again  
> thanks for reading! :)


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